TWAIN

[Dr. Goodword]

• twain •

Pronunciation: twayn • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: Two.

Notes: Rudyard Kipling must have been the last English speaker to use today's word as anything other than a name. He did so in his poem, The Ballad of East and West, which begins: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat." The phrase, "never the twain shall meet," however, has found a permanent place among our idiomatic phrases.

In Play: The most famous play on this word was made by perhaps the greatest word-player of us all, Samuel Clemens. As a boy, Clemens rode steamboats up and down the Mississippi, where sailing was safe in water two fathoms or more deep. The river boatmen who checked the depth would call out "mark twain" to alert the captain when their two-fathom-long lines struck bottom. He took that phrase as his pseudonym, Mark Twain.

Word History: PIE dwo- "two", which underlies today's word, shows up in Russian and Serbian dva, German zwei (and zwo), Latin due, French deux, Spanish dos, Portuguese dois, Hindi do, and Nepalese dui. However, it also appears in words where you might not expect it: twilight, of course, is when the two lights (day and night) meet. The reason you can only be between two things (you must be among more than two) is the tween "two" in the preposition. Does it sound a little like twine, the string made by twisting two threads together? No wonder. Finally, doubt is the result of French twitching Latin dubitare "to waver", that's right, between two choices. (We are delighted that Larry Brady, the Stargazer of the Alpha Agora [now with more than 700 members], never wavers when he spots a curious word like this one, which he suggested for today.)

[Sunny]

I always wondered why TWAIN drivers for scanners, etc, were called TWAIN drivers. Your post prompted me to do a little digging.

Answer: An image capture API for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. The standard was first released in 1992, and is currently ratified at version 1.9 as of January 2000. TWAIN is typically used as an interface between image processing software and a scanner or digital camera.

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard. "

[Dr. Goodword]

I was tempted to add that definition to the standard ones but decided against it because it would have made the essaylet too long and also because the capitalization (TWAIN) suggests that it really came from an acronym, chosen because it is the same as a word.

It also isn't as interesting as the other meanings.

[Stargzer]

. . . The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard. "

So TWAIN in this sense apparently was taken from Kipling, and is not really an acronym, but a backronym. Doc, ya lost a chance for yet another lesson.

[Slava]

Another backronym, though I date myself a bit here, is Lee Iacocca's family name:

I Am Chairman Of Chrysler Corporation, America.

Or doesn't that count? I know another one, based on Gorbachev, but it's in Russian and makes no sense in translation. Bummer.

[Perry]

It would probably be better for Chrysler if he still was chairman.